Put on your tinfoil hat!
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.
But this isn’t just any normal political theory. After Internet blowhards started circulating rumors that Obama was born in Kenya, the Obama campaign published a scan of his birth certificate.
So the wingnuts moved on to claiming that the scan was a cunning Photoshop fake. They said that the black rectangle covering the certificate number was deeply suspicious, as was the lack of a state seal.
So factcheck.org had their people personally inspect the birth certificate, and take high resolution digital photos showing the embossed state seal, and the redacted certificate number.
The Director of Health for Hawaii has issued a statement saying that she and her deputy also personally inspected the state’s copy of Obama’s birth certificate, and found it to be genuine.
People have even tracked down the birth announcement published in the Honolulu Advertiser, available in the microfilm archives in Hawaii libraries, and published a scan of that.
All of which puts the lawsuit into hilarious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory. We’re asked to believe that not only did the Obama campaign fake a legal document and sneak copies into the state archives, they also went to the libraries that have copies of the Honolulu Advertiser in their archives and made sure the microfilm was replaced with edited film images, no doubt carefully aged to look genuine. Or perhaps Barack Obama immigrated from Kenya and took the identity of the real Barack Obama, murdering him and disposing of the body–that would explain why he doesn’t look like a Muslim, right?
Yeah, that’s the kind of theory the Supreme Court may decide to evaluate on Friday. So for maximum amusement value, let’s hope they take on the case, then lay the smackdown–because obviously that would prove that even the Supreme Court has been inducted into the conspiracy.